Love and Coffee
by GenericOregairuFan
Summary: The light novel series Love and Coffee, written by Hikigaya Hachiman, is currently the most popular in all of Japan. But, the story of its inspiration is anything but a romantic comedy...
1. Chapter 1

**_September 17th 2023, 1:49 AM_**

My name is Hikigaya Hachiman.

Before I begin my recount, which incidentally I am writing purely for my own clarity and (probably) self-indulgence, allow me to provide you with all the necessary exposition you'll need for it to make sense. If you're a fan of light novels, or are in any way acquainted with the world of light novel publishing, you'll probably have heard my name at this poin, or at least the name of the series that I write: Love and Coffee. I can say, without any arrogance, that it's probably the most successful in all of Japan right now. That is just a truth, and the majority of those who read the books and call themselves my fans would probably agree with me.

Love and Coffee, put simply, isn't about very much. The main criticism that people tend to levee towards it is that the plot lacks action, which again is not an arrogance in the sense that they are assuming no one else can also discern this, but a truth. But it is a stupid truth, because Love and Coffee is not a fantasy or an action light novel series; it is a romantic comedy light novel series aimed at an adolescent or older audience. Criticising a romantic comedy because 'not much happens', which is essentially code for 'things _do_ happen, just not the things that I _want_ to happen', is the equivalent of criticising a horror novel because it has frightening scenes. A romantic comedy is about build up and romantic tension, not about fast paced shounen-esque demon fights, so shut up.

This steadfast defence of Love and Coffee probably suggests to you that I feel affection for my creation- in fact, the feelings I have towards my creation are anything _but_ affection. I used to quite enjoy writing Love and Coffee. It used to be quite therapeutic, but now it is an inexorable chore. Every time I sit down at my laptop and begin typing away at Volume 6, I swear that my heart plummets into my stomach, and not just because I'm currently suffering from Writer's Block and also something that might be insomnia. I realised only a couple of months ago that every word I'd published of Love and Coffee was shit. I didn't used to care because I was making a load of money from it, and I was actually doing something with my life and I was making my parents and Komachi proud, and that couldn't really be described as a bad thing.

But money and fleeting fame can only deceive you for so long. That is the most intriguing thing about both of them. They remind me a little of fireworks. At first, both of them are so bright and entrancing, poetic and dazzling and whatever other adjective you want to use. They ignite in a storming galaxy of every colour, so huge that the tiny little pupils of your eyes can barely comprehend them, but the one thing that they _can_ comprehend is that at once, everything beside them appears to be just a little sombre and black. Gloomy, like the night sky that they were painted across.

But then, that amalgamation of colour and delight fades. It doesn't take much to realise that it wasn't even really an amalgamation at all, but a mess. They weren't really colours- just artificial and superfluous. It wasn't really delight, but simply the perpetual illusion of being overwhelmed. Then, it's apparent that even that very night sky you disregarded as dull and uninteresting is more preferable to the emptiness you feel at the passing of those fizzing light's spell. Actually, you have to blink because your eyes sting a bit, and there's a definite ringing in your ears.

I used to justify the shitness of Love and Coffee by lowering the whole genre it belonged to down to that level. _Light novels aren't exactly supposed to be high quality literature. Originality is over-rated as long as the delivery is good._ But the delivery wasn't good. It wasn't even adequate. It was generic and bland, and the illusion of its inexplainable success is, ironically, probably because of that. If Love and Coffee has taught me anything-

Actually, no. It hasn't taught me anything. It's only reaffirmed a belief that I've had for a long time. People enjoy shit because they themselves are shit.

And, it was in that realisation, that sudden epiphany, that I truly remembered all the events that had taken place in New York, now over five years ago, in the autumn of 2018. I'd thought about them often- enough to motivate me to write the first volume of Love and Coffee, in fact- but I hadn't really _remembered_ them. In that epiphany, I remembered the coffee house, and the skyscrapers and the constant people, and the gentle melancholia of the city lights from my apartment, and the thinking and the uncomfortable but also comforting directionless of everything. But most of all, I remembered Yukinoshita Yukino, because it occured to me that in denying the truth that was the lonely, vacuous sham of my life I was doing exactly what had so repulsed me about the woman I fell in love with. That is why I am writing.

It's just about gone two o'clock in the morning. I didn't sleep very well while I was there either. At the end of the two weeks I spent in America, I knew her so clearly, and so deeply, that it seemed as if the name itself had been imprinted on my mind like red hot iron from the forge of a blacksmith. I knew her hobbies, her family, her dreams of old, how her hair looked when drenched by rain, how brightly her eyes seemed to glimmer in the darkness. In short, one would think we were the closest of friends, or maybe something else entirely. But my name?

She wouldn't even be aware of it.

I am sorry to the person who reads this recount, _if_ they do, that it will not be as compromising a read as Love and Coffee.

* * *

 **Front Cover:**

 **Love and Coffee**

 **Volume One of the Hit Series!**

 **Written by Hikigaya Hachiman**

 **Illustrations by Ponkan 8**

 **GAGAGA**

 **Page One:**

 _ **LOVE AND COFFEE**_

 **Page Two:**

First published in Japan by Shogakukan.

First published in the USA and Great Britain by Yen Press.

Shogakukan is a division of Hitotsubashi Group LTD and the Love and Coffee light novel series is a trademark propery of Hitotsubashi Group LTD under Japanese federal law.

The Shogakukan website is .

Conditions of sale:

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade of otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwie circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which is it published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

 **Page Three:**

Praise for _LOVE AND COFFEE_

'The writing is engaging and all too addictive. If only all light novels could be like this' _Hokkaido Shimbun_

'The reason for its success in Japan is all too evident, and in crossing the Pacific it appears to have lost none of its potent, anarchic, self-aware hilarity' _New York Times_

'The biggest light novel series around, and for good reason' _The Guardian_

 _VOLUME 6 WILL BE PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER 2023!_

 **Page Four:**

This book is dedicated to all the other publishing houses who point blank rejected it.

Special thanks to the cutest imouto in the world, Hikigaya Komachi

 **Page Five to Eight:**

 _Foreword_

I doubt anyone will take notice of this, because let's face it, who actually reads the foreword (or even the prologue most of the time) these days? Certainly not me; when I was a teenager growing up in Chiba, virtually the entirety of my _obviously_ fulfilling youth was spent reading light novels, and I'm relatively certain that not once in all of that time did I take any interest in the comments of a smug writer on their usually subpar piece of writing. But hey, if you _are_ in fact so flattering as to think my comments are worth your time, then I commend you for your good taste.

The reason for the existence of the snazzy re-issued copy of Love and Coffee: Volume One in your hands is, supposedly at least, to celebrate the sale of its one millionth copy, including both here in Japan and in Western territories. All five of the currently released volumes are also reaching similar sales figures. A tankobon volume of the manga adaptation of the series has already been released, and Kyoto Animation has recently bought the rights for an anime, which is scheduled for release next May.

Reflecting on those figures even as I write, I can still scarcely believe that they've materialised at all. I started writing this book for several reasons, and not a single one of them was to make money, though I'd be lying through my teeth if I said that all this newfound financial security hasn't been welcomed with open arms. Boredom was honestly a big part of it. I'd just returned from a two week trip to New York which itself served as inspiration for the concept, and had little else to do in the evenings after my various part time jobs.

The other big reason was simply passion for the format. As you've probably gathered from my earlier comments, I love light novels. It's one of those few types of entertainment that can be both hideously low quality and still gloriously entertaining. Perfect for general procrastination, for relax-reading before bed, and especially good for the long afternoons that I spent, and still spend, not doing all that much. So, it fills me with a whole lot of pride to know that there could be other Hikigaya Hachimans, lamenting the evils of youth as I used to so fervently, reading Love and Coffee and thinking "You know what... I could probably make a living out of that."

I'll conclude my foreword, which I've kept short and snappy partly out of preference and partly out of contractual word limit requirements, by dishing out the obligatory gratitude. Thank you to everyone who's bought and read Love and Coffee, and totally transformed my life. Thank you to the positive reviewers who've so effectively swelled my ego, and to the negative ones that kept it in check (however brutally). Just thank you, really. Keep reading and I'll keep writing.

Gosh... I'm beginning to sound like a dirty little riajuu!

 _Hikigaya Hachiman_

 **Page Seven to Twenty One:**

 _Prologue_

THERE are two types of people in this world. Those types are not, as would probably be expected, good and evil. They are not the fortunate and the unfortunate. It is not even, as every cliche action movie seems to have suggested at some point in their script, "those who pull the trigger and those who do not" or whatever slightly altered phrasing upon that each screenwriter uses to differentiate themselves. In fact, the two types that _I've_ derived are definitely the best and most fitting; they are as follows. The dirty little riajuu and the loners.

You've probably already guessed which type that I belong to from the derogatory manner in which I spoke of the riajuu of planet Earth. So yeah, I can affirm without the slightest hint of shame, that I, Nagatomo Etsuji, am a loner. Wait, no. I'm more than that. I'm the loneliest loner that ever loned. Other loners blush when they see the extent of my lonerish awesomeness. The Emperor of Loners, perhaps. Or maybe the Duke? Regardless, I totally deserve a title.

I am also incredibly proud of the fact that I'm a loner. It is similar to how one might be patriotic about their national allegiance; I, on the other hand, am patriotic about my societal allegiance (I mean, I'm not sure you can use the word patriotic about anything _but_ countries, but whatever). It is definitely the best of the two types, for reasons that I will now describe, while also dispelling some myths about loners that I will prove to be untruthful propaganda.

You see, Japan and indeed most civilised countries live in the system we call democracy (or at least a system as close to true democracy as we can get). Democracy invariably results in the majority having power, and unfortunately, the majority of people fall into the riajuu category. This means that riajuu suppose themselves to have a kind of self-appointed authority over everyone else, and horrendously abuse that authority by perpetuating slander against my kindren. You know who also manipulated the truth? Adolf Hitler. Therefore, all riajuu are Nazis, confirmed. It also confirms that all loners are having their human rights violated every day. This is an outrage!

Continuing with my social activism, I'd like to tell you of the first, and probably the most prevalent, lie that they spread about loners. While we're on the subject, I have collected all of the most common of these lies into a list of 26, which I refer to simply as the 26 Sins, and will probably hark back to quite a lot. Just a warning. Lie 1 of these is this: _loners are sad and depressed._

I find this assumption to be very irritating. The classification of loner in no way constitutes or even suggests that a loner must also be sad or depressed, or even lonely, really. Source: Me. I have found over the years that being with yourself is actually infinitely more rewarding than being with others. For example, there are few quite a few pleasures that one can only enjoy with themselves (don't be dirty minded...), like conversation. Despite what you may think, conversation is not a two way thing. In fact, I'd go as far to say that one has not truly conversed until they've conversed with themselves. When talking to yourself, everything that is said is absolutely right, and there's no chance that you'll annoy or embarrass yourself, or be forced into something inconvenient that you definitely don't want to do.

Furthermore, I've also found that being a loner, separated from other people, really helps to lend perspective to every day life. You begin to appreciate the small things that idiot riajuu would only glance at, like the extra moments you steal in bed before the start of a school day, or cups of coffee or listening to music.

To conclude, being a loner is the superior way of life, and anyone who says otherwise is either horrifically misguided or a retard.

That's not to say that the loner way of life is perfect, though. There are admittedly some (very limited...) perks to being a riajuu as well. As a loner, the amount that you can do with your spare time is limited, although once you become accustomed to the hours in the evening after homework has been completed, this isn't really a problem. Ironically, it soon becomes strange and disturbing if you _don't_ spend your time alone. These perks range from the significant to the trivial, such as the former all the way down to being able to go to that really nice cafe a couple of streets away from the school site without feeling self-conscious.

Yep. That is genuinely my biggest gripe with being a loner- a very very small reduction in the availability of caffeine. But, being something of a coffee enthusiast (a nicer way of saying that you're an addict), _any_ reduction in the availability of caffeine would be enough for me to trigger a nuclear war. If I had the power to do that, I mean. And the other major global power was trying to imidate me by means of destroying the supply of legal narcotics.

I'm exaggerating, of course, but coffee has actually ended up being the source of a great amount of strife for me of late. It probably says something that the events of the past year or so have been far away the most dramatic of my high school education, but that something would not be a complaint on my account. I'd much rather my life be stress-less than stressful. That is, after all, one of the most important rules for loners to live their life by: _if at all possible, don't._

So yeah. Recently, I've had to go against that mantra by engaging in a few instances of... god forbid it... _human interaction._ But good things can always emerge from bad- that is, if you look at the bad long and hard enough. Those interactions have helped me on the way to formulating another mantra, the importance of which will soon become clear, and which I'd strongly advise that you adopt for your own.

Women and coffee. No... _love_ and coffee. Both the greatest blessings, and curses, in any man's life.

* * *

 _ **At the end of the two weeks I spent in New York, I knew Yukinoshita Yukino so clearly that it seemed as if the name itself had been imprinted on my mind like red hot iron from the forge of a blacksmith. But my name? She wouldn't even be aware of it.**_

 **There's a couple of things that you need to know before proceeding- this is an AU where Yukino, instead of returning to Soubu High after studying abroad, stayed there (canonically it hasn't really been confirmed where or even if she travelled at all, but that's the deal here). I settled on New York simply because I think it's an interesting city. So, the Service Club never happened and Hachiman remained the person he was at the start of Volume 1 (he still saved Yuigahama's dog but they never really spoke afterwards).**


	2. Chapter 2

_**September 19th 2023, 4:32 PM**_

I wrote the first entry of this (whatever _this_ is... I used the word 'recount' beforehand, but I fear that my thoughts will be far too scrambled to label it anything more than a stream of consciousness) in the small hours of the morning, so the memory of actually writing the words is already blurred, in addition to my motive for writing them. If there is a silver lining to irregular sleep habits, it is that it lends extra time for contemplation that you otherwise wouldn't have in the day. I find that it is at night, when half embarked on the passage to your dreams, that your mind is the least muddled.

I suppose it was an impulse. An impulse to record those thoughts that I was having, and the emotions that accompanied them. The best thing about words is their ability to capture things that would usually be unintangible- in a story, a love affair or a car crash or whatever the hell you want is no longer something indescribable, and internalised. Instead, it is right there on the computer screen that I always type on, and therefore, it is recorded. It _exists._ It can be remembered.

I suppose that I want to preserve those two weeks, even if no one ever cares or reads it. Even if the only person that preservation matters to is myself. I want to preserve _her._ Yukinoshita Yukino, or at least the woman that she is in my mind and my dreams and my memories. Because, at about half past two in the morning, two days ago, I thought that I truly saw and felt her again, in the room beside me, for the first time in five years. Standing beside the bed or perhaps within it, her eyes like chips of ice burning at a thousand degrees, her lips never quite touching my own, but nevertheless undeniably present. That ridiculous notion both comforted me and angered me, and I think that was why I reached down and grabbed my laptop.

I didn't write anymore of the recount (I will continue to call it a recount for the forseeable future) yesterday because I was trying to write more of Volume 6. Nothing came, and although writing this will probably only serve as yet another distraction, I can't help but think that it is infinitely more deserving of my attention.

So here am I, typing away, not entirely sure where to go next. But, I suppose that every good recount needs a proper beginning, not some barely comprehensible nonsense that I typed when half asleep.

Five years ago, I suppose that I was twenty six years old. Just old enough that university and monotonous days in a classroom seemed very much a thing of the past, but still young enough that life still felt as if it were dangling on that shuddering precipice just before true adulthood. I'd decided somewhere along the way that the clearest path to a livelihood, or perhaps just the easiest and most obvious, was to become a teacher. I'd always been told I was good, or at least a respectable writer, but never felt much of an urge to write for myself despite my love for light novels. So, after earning my degree, I did my training and became a teaching assistant at the very high school that I myself had attended: Soubu High.

It was a little odd returning to it at first, but since I reserved no feelings of affection for the place (in fact, my memories of it are pretty overwhelmingly negative), the necessity for human existence that is routine quickly sprung up. Just like in my adolescence, I was waking up bright and early in the morning and walking over to those familiar school gates, though this time with close to a dozen more years burdening my shoulders. I soon found myself with enough money, accrued both from the teaching gig and about a dozen other part time jobs around Chiba, to be living in an apartment. My life was taking shape.

And yet, at twenty six, living in the very same streets and districts and gloomy grey buildings that I'd lived all my life, I couldn't but feel that I didn't much like the beginnings of that shape. There were jagged edges and sharp points were there should have been soft curves. Isolation is nothing strange to me, but despite frequent visitations from my adorable imouto Komachi, that isolation was swiftly becoming alienation. I felt cut off from everything that I'd always known, and yet never really known at all. Constantly ensnared in the trappings of my own mind, and living a life that I didn't quite seem to belong to. In other words, I was having a midlife crisis twenty years too early.

And what does one do when undergoing a midlife crisis? Start planning some crazed, half forgotten adventure dreamed up in your youth that was probably forgotten for a very good reason. Since my own ambitions had always been kept restrained within the realm of possibility, it was perhaps fitting that my solution to this burst of melancholy was something as mundane as to travel. It is an old and naive assumption; that life will be lent more meaning, or somehow become less difficult overnight, simply by a change in a location and the dispelling of familiarity, but nonetheless an appealing one.

So, I waited until there was a break in the school year (my rebellion wasn't to be _so_ radical as to leave while I was still working) and then, as that two week holiday approached, I organised everything for a trip to New York without consulting anyone at all. I wanted this search for an epiphany to be a lonesome search, despite the fact one of my intentions was to alleviate lonesomeness in the first place. The faulty logic didn't even occur to me at the time, and neither did the full financial ramifications of the flight across the Atlantic ocean. A large portion of my savings disappeared with the click of a button. I didn't really think out any particular course of action, and what's more, didn't _want_ there to be a structure. The irregularity of it all was the appeal.

And New York? No reason. It was, in all seriousness, one of the first proper nouns to spring to the forefront of my mind while on the web. Since my family had never been well off, the furthest I'd ever been from Chiba was still very much in Japan, and the whole world was something new and ever so slightly exhilarating, and the more exhilarating, the more affirming the experience became, the better. It was a harebrained philosophy to follow, but one that achieved results, albeit questionable in their success. I remember very little about the flight itself (perhaps because I was asleep) and I arrived in New York feeling somewhere between intimidated and excited. And a little annoyed, for as soon as I switched off aeroplane mode on my phone, I was bombarded by a rush of missed call and voicemail notifications from my family asking where on earth I was and _what_ on earth I was hoping to achieve in worrying them.

I booked my hotel in advance, a three star place just a couple of blocks away from Manhattan, and arrived there with my single suitcase packed only with the essentials- my laptop, a couple of light novels, clothes and a washbag. It was on a fairly crumby backstreet called Pathway Avenue, but the building of the hotel, suitably named The Liberty, was the tallest on it and so my fview from the eleventh floor was an expansive one. The room was small and cleaned only often, but perfectly adequate for my undemanding needs. I remember when I first entered, I dropped everything, pulled up a chair in front of the window and sat there. Sit and stare, for what must've been an hour or more.

You see, after living in Chiba for twenty six years, I honestly thought that I knew what a city was. A city was the blaring horns of traffic and the exhausting streets and the greyish sky and the fumes and a whole lot of people on their way to a job or a different city or place. New York was all of that, but it was somehow simultaneously about five hundred thousand other things. It is a sensitive spot, a hub, of everything that could cross a man's mind for the briefest second, and it indulges in that thought until there, nearby the Statue of Liberty and the Empire States Building, another skyscraper or business emerges. It is so huge and so overflowing at the seams that I admit I felt completely lost, but that was okay, because in another hotel on the other side of the city there was another Hikigaya Hachiman who felt just as swallowed by the bristling movement of that absurd city, and that meant that I wasn't truly lost at all. In fact, it meant precisely the opposite.

I don't know what I was expecting to happen in the two weeks that followed. I don't know if I thought that I'd meet someone in the throng of a billion someones, or find even really find anything at all. I didn't know if I was inspired or even more depressed, and I _definitely_ didn't know how I wanted to spend the time that I'd booked in New York's (needless to say) rather busy schedule.

For the first three days, I embarked upon-

* * *

 _ **September 19th 2023, 5:17 PM**_

 _Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Rin-_

 _Hachiman:_ What is it, Katsomoto-kun-

 _Koto:_ Oh... Hachiman! I must admit, I wasn't actually expecting you to pick up.

 _Hachiman:_ I don't blame you. It's not like I've answered much before-

 _Koto:_ Which, by the way, is incredibly annoying. Do you remember when you actually used to talk to me? You know, communication? Pretty radical, I know.

 _Hachiman:_ You can text me. It's a lot less distracting than listening to your voice, Katsomoto-kun.

 _Koto:_ *sigh* I don't know how many times I've asked you to call me by my given name, Hachiman-

 _Hachiman:_ It's very probably totalled into the hundreds, Katsomoto-kun. And I don't remember ever giving you permission to call me by _my_ given name either.

 _Koto:_ Five years working together must equate to something. Is it really so hard to consider that we might be friends-

 _Hachiman:_ It's not hard to think about, per say. Just pointless, because it's implausible.

 _Koto:_... Well, if you're gonna insist on being childish, then I suppose I'll be take the initiative and be professional. You probably know why I've called.

 _Hachiman:_ Yeah, and you didn't need to. I'm writing it.

 _Koto:_ That's it?

 _Hachiman:_ That's what?

 _Koto:_ You're writing it? That's genuinely the best you can give me? I need more than that. How many chapters have you done, a word count, how long before you send me the manuscript, _something-_

 _Hachiman:_ I don't know what you want me to say. I'll send it when I finish it.

 _Koto:_ It's part of your contract to update us, Hachiman. It was never a problem for the first few volumes.

 _Hachiman:_ And I've updated you, so can I hang up no-

 _Koto:_ C'mon man! Can you just give me a preliminary? The big guys up top are on my ass enough asking for details as it is. It wasn't you that got the shit talking and the rants when we had to put back the release date the first time.

 _Hachiman:_...

 _Koto:_ Nothing?

 _Hachiman:_...

 _Koto:_... Fine. I'm hanging up-

 _Hachiman:_ Three chapters.

 _Koto:_...

 _Hachiman:_ You gonna say something...?

 _Koto:_... Jesus fucking christ man. Please tell me your taking the piss-

 _Hachiman:_ Don't complain to me, Katsomoto-kun. You asked for an update; I gave you an update.

 _Koto:_... Nah. I'm glad you told me at least. _*exhale*_ Did you write those recently, or...?

 _Hachiman:_... Not exactly.

 _Koto:_ So you've got Writer's Block, basically? I mean, I'd already guessed as much, but it'll be nice to get confirmation.

 _Hachiman:_ Actually, I was writing when you called.

 _Koto:_ Really?

 _Hachiman:_ Yeah.

 _Koto:_... Are you alright, man?

 _Hachiman:_ I told you. The manuscript will come-

 _Koto:_ I'm not asking about your writing. I'm asking about you. Can you genuinely tell me that you're cool?

 _Hachiman:_...

 _Koto:_ 'Cause believe me, it's fine if you aren't. It's pretty common with writers, actually. Even if you don't wanna talk to me about it, we can find someone to help you out-

 _Call end._


	3. Chapter 3

**September 22nd 2023, 9:13 AM**

Katsomoto Koto is not necessarily a bad person. He has none of the overtly irritating qualities that would make me dislike him, such as arrogance, or smugness, or extreme and obviously fake modesty, or an insistence on retaining their own opinion. Essentially, this is me saying that I dislike all forms of extroversion. He actually possesses several personality attributes that I would tend to grudgingly admire; for the most part, he is blunt and honest about his opinion, defends it well and enforces it accordingly, and never descends into the hyperbole or the pandering of your average sycophant at Shogakukan Publishing. Ironically, it is exactly the fact that he is blunt and honest that I dislike him.

Reading back on what I've just written, you'd probably get the impression that I'm a misanthrope. After all, I did say that I hate people who compromise and pretend, while then contradicting myself by claiming that I also hate the polar opposite of this. And you'd be absolutely right in thinking that. I am, undoubtedly, a misanthrope. There are only three people that I have loved, or still love, in my life. Yours Truly, Hikigaya Komachi, and her. And, just to spite him, you can be reassured that Katsomoto Koto is just about as far from establishing himself on that list as humanly possible.

You see, I realised very early on in my stint as a light novel author (bearing in mind this was when I actually _had_ inspiration) that you quickly become to perceive every comment about your work as a personal insult. Negative review in the paper? That's slander. Positive review on a blog? That's probably also slander. Praise for my 'writing talent' from a fan? So impossibly wrong. Deserved critique of the fact I can't meet a single fucking deadline from my editor? Yeah. That's the worst, most slanderous piece of slander that ever crossed a man's tongue. I really should call my lawyer. Not that I even know the guy's name.

But- and how pathetic is this- Koto Katsomoto is also probably one of the few people I genuinely trust. His advice, or his words at least, are not as flimsy and easily blown away that they remind me of playing card pyramids. Those kind of words, the sheer, empty ones, come from my fans, my critics, and a great many other people I wouldn't be able to name. If I relied on the texts of Katsomoto, which I often do, their foundations would not crumble at my touch, but would hold firm, because I know they have that cementing honesty. Sometimes, they hurt, yes. Sometimes, they are jagged and draw blood, but I'd rather they draw blood than fail to scratch the surface.

Yet after our texts on the 19th, I really despised him. Sincerely and deeply. Really really fucking despised him. If that conversation had been conducted in person, my fist would've landed firmly in his (incidentally very snub) face. I don't need to be told that I'm not okay. I don't need to be told that the life of Hikigaya Hachiman is more of a colossal, wasting wreck than the fucking Titanic. I don't need to be told than when it's night and I'm obviously not sleeping, I feel so tired and exhausted with everything that it's like I really _am_ aboard the Titanic, with water surrounding me like a veil of sapphires, and I swear I can hear a melancholy symphony of violins, announcing my inevitable drowning like a king's fanfare.

Sometimes, a lie is the most beautiful thing that can bless your ears. Not the kindest, or the right thing. Not even close. But still beautiful. I've learnt that lesson a great many times, from a great many different people, so don't go feeling special about yourself, Katsomoto Koto.

You know what else can be beautiful? Melancholy. Yet another contradiction in the huge, overwhelming contradiction that is humanity. Sometimes, melancholy can be wonderful, because it can inspire you to improve yourself or better the life of another, or help you to get in the zone for a chapter. Melancholia is a poignant fuel for any author, as the strongest emotions are the best to feed off, and there's none stronger than sadness. You can write for hours and hours and hours if you're feeling something, even if that something isn't generally perceived to be good.

I'm melancholy pretty much all the time, but I remember the melancholy that I felt at the beginning of New York impossibly clearly, like the feeling was bottled within me as the finest of wines, ready to be uncorked and enjoyed again at a moment's notice. It was soft, like being wrapped in a duvet of musing, made hot by the temperature of the equally boundless musings in your dreams. I felt it from the view at the top of my apartment, and even stronger throughout the first three days.

You know what I did for those first three days? Absolutely fucking nothing. And my God, it was the most perfect nothing I've ever enjoyed in all my days. I spent hours wandering through the labyrinthian streets of New York, taking in every sight and face that walked past, observing but not enjoying or judging. Just looking. A lot of the time, it feels like I live the entirety of my life balanced ungracefully on the periphery of that very life, and that was certainly true for those hours. I was the ghost chained to the lamp-post at six o'clock in the evening, flickering faintly as if I and that burning yellow light were the very same entity. I was the speck of dust blown up by the workman's drill repearing an imperfection on the tarmac of a main road.

In short, I wandered around and found things. Most of the stuff I found was stuff I could've found back home in Chiba, but there was no discrimination in the profundity of my enjoyment. There was, however, one little place that I kept on coming back to, over and over again. Once, in the second day I think, I spent something like six hours there, again doing very little and absolutely revelling in doing very little.

The cafe was called Pirelli's. It was tucked away in some obscure turn off from a Manhattan road that I can no longer bring forth to memory, but the cafe itself, in contrast, has aged within my mind incredibly well, and I can still feel it's old wooden tables and taste the strangely scintillating aroma of its coffee, fossiled on my fingertips and around the edges of my nostrils. It was hilariously quaint, with a painted sign that was beginning to curl and fall down to the pavement, and waiters that could barely speak a word of English and definitely weren't Italian, but that worked fine for me as studying English in class, let me tell you, is a _whole_ different gig to speaking it. Thinking about it right now, my preparation for that trip was unbelievably dreadful. It's a wonder I even survived. In fact, it's a wonder _anyone_ manages to survive, regardless of situation or appearance or nationality. Not even an optimist can deny that, throughout history, humans are universally linked by suffering.

My favourite spot in Pirelli's was right in the corner, as this was the best spot for what quickly became one of my favourite pointless pastimes while at the cafe: watching all of the other customers. The corner was the perfect angle, for I myself was obscurred from the view of the other tables by a pillar, but by leaning slightly to the right, I'd be granted a full and joyfully intrusive view of them without they themselves being granted a joyfully intrusive view of me. I could spy on them without shame and without restraint. Perfect. I would always get one of two coffees; one, an Americano in celebration of my current location, and two, a latte in celebration of my fabulously brilliant taste. In my hand would be the light novel or the English language book I bought from a second hand bookshop after much gesticulation with the owner, and was attempting in vain to understand.

Heh. I think you're probably beginning to see where all of this nonsense about New York began to inspire Love and Coffee. Let's see: we have a cynical, disillusioned main character trapped in a society that he confesses to abhor, with an irrepresible urge for coffee, and a favoured cafe by which to drink said coffee. Volume One of Love and Coffee was structurally very simple- three encounters with three other girls who attend Etsuji's highschool, all of which also come to the cafe regularly for their own personal reasons. Each of them have a base dilemma which, Etsuji being the reluctantly helpful individual that he is, he helps to try and resolve before the volume is over, growing closer with all three as it progresses. Hilarity, misunderstandings and various degrees of idiocy ensue. Of course, the ending was already a foregone conclusion. The dillemmas _aren't_ resolved, thus giving Etsuji further reason to talk to them in later volumes and more development for the pairings.

Of course, I'm saying all this presuming that, if one _was_ to read this recount for whatever reason, they'd be doing so with previous knowledge of Love and Coffee. The similarities will be breathtakingly apparent to one who did, and to be brutally honest, I can't be bothered to waste time filling in any more blanks for those without that knowledge. Go and read them (effectively giving me more money) if you want to understand my ramblings to a more intrinsic degree. It was in Pirelli's that, for the first time, I saw Yukinoshita Yukino. The fourth day of my trip to New York.

Unfortunately, writing of Love and Coffee has only served up a painful reminder that I shouldn't be writing _about_ Love and Coffee instead of assuming the identity of Nagatomo Etsuji once more. In a paltry attempt to lend routine to a life abysmally lacking in it, I tend to fail in making progress on Love and Coffee in the morning, usually from ten to twelve o'clock. It's five past now, so I'm procrastinating already. I was procrastinating by writing this at all.

What's more, I am melancholy, as we previously established is the normality, but that melancholy is not of the strength required to write, nor even appropriately think, of my love.

God. I was just thinking about how much I fucking hate Nagatomo Etsuji. What does that tell you?

* * *

 **SCHEDULE OF HIKIGAYA HACHIMAN:** _ **DO NOT IGNORE**_

 **Monday 20th September 2023:** Write Love and Coffee. Remember to tweet about the new Love and Coffee merchandise again. Phone Komachi. Try to get some damn sleep.

 **Tuesday 21st September 2023:** Write Love and Coffee. Call Katsomoto? Phone Komachi. Try to get some damn sleep.

 **Wednesday 22nd September 2023:** Write Love and Coffee. Phone Komachi. Try to get some damn sleep.

 **Thursday 23st September 2023:** Write Love and Coffee. Phone Komachi. Try to get some damn sleep.

 **Friday 24th September 2023:** Write Love and Coffee. Remember to tweet about the new Love and Coffee merchandise again. Phone Komachi. Try to get some damn sleep.

 **Saturday 25th September 2023:** Write Love and Coffee. **DEADLINE FOR PHONING KOMACHI, IF YOU DON'T DO THIS YOU ARE THE MOST EVIL FUCKING PERSON ON THE PLANET, FUCKING CALL HER, IT HAS BEEN TWO MONTHS.** Try to get some damn sleep.

 **Sunday 26th September 2023:** Home interview thing. Write Love and Coffee. Try to get some damn sleep. If previous deadline is not met, phone Komachi.


	4. Chapter 4

**AN: My keyboard doesn't have a hashtag button for some reason, so I'm using brackets to represent them in this story.**

* * *

 **Hikigaya Hachiman**

 _ **thenonfakeHikigaya, 22 Sept, Official Twitter Account**_

Remember to check out the new official Love and Coffee merchandise from Animaru on Amazon. New copies of the reprinted version of Volume 1 are also available. _**(loveandcoffee) (shogakukan)**_

 _ **Replies to thenonfakeHikigaya, 22 Sept, Official Twitter Account**_

 **machikomeibestgirl:** Hows volume 6 coming along

 **randaccon:** stfu

 **LandCFaaaannn:** Stop tweeting about dakimakura crap and write something.

* * *

 **23rd September 2023, 5:27 PM**

I have absolutely no idea why I keep returning to read Love and Coffee being fully aware that what I've been producing- or more accurately churning out- for about five years is intolerably dreadful. Usually, the practice will only bring me frustration for even being convinced that it was worthy of attention in the first place. Praise falls on deaf ears the day you realise that the only opinion you have to live with is your own. Furthermore, the longer that you write, and the more words that appear surreptitiously on the paper or the screen, the less feeling you invest in them. At least when I typed the first volume, before I had even the slightest premonition that the name Nagatomo Etsuji would become as familiar to thousands as the name Yukinoshita Yukino has to me, it felt like there was something definitively happening as I typed.

But, the emotion that compelled me then throughout the first volume, and the emotion that is compelling me even now, is identical. Then again, can I really over simplify things so catastrophically by calling it an emotion? I'm not feeling something specific, per say. More so, the compulsion is Yukinoshita Yukino herself, exploding all around me, rich in the air like the scent of ripening dates, surging down into my fingers to be received like one of those electrical transformers. Her smoldering presence, choking, suffocating, forcing the words out from within my subconscious. Maybe Yukinoshita Yukino and emotion are just interchangeable to me now, and those two words are no longer proper nouns but abstract nouns. Do words even work like that?

She's my muse, I suppose. My beautiful, strangling muse.

In fairness, when I say that I read Love and Coffee, I only read it for her. That would explain it. Basically, it's me being a pathetic, wistful idiot. People talk about what _they_ found as a meaning in Love and Coffee, but the meanings they find are as incomprehensible as they are utterly pointless and pretentious, because the sentences wander around a meaning that doesn't exist. They resonate with their author precisely because their author wasn't _looking_ for a meaning, and the presumption that writing has to have one is ignorant and stupid. It is a story about a girl that, most likely, remains on the other side of the planet, wrapped around the pretence of high school romance and a light novel and Nagatomo Etsuji and his three love interests. I read it because I swear that I can feel her on the pages as heat bursting from a radiator, a thousand degrees, leaving ugly scorch marks on my hands, and being burned by someone is very probably preferable to missing them with all the helplessness of a soldier's widow.

The girls in Love and Coffee bare those blackened scars too. They're like a theme and variation. A painter will find himself a subject, realise it on a canvas, and then realise it again on three diferent canvases, perhaps in a slightly differing style, or if the subject were a person, with different coloured hair or clothes.

The first girl that Etsuji meets at the cafe, in the second chapter I think (although he sees her and comments vaguely on this), is called Kanawa Kagami. I can't quite pinpoint when Love and Coffee appeared in the recesses of my mind, only that it was blooming on the flight back to Chiba and the prologue appeared a day after I got back. The memories were still sharp in my mind. I was highly conscious that writing of her directly would probably bring bile to my throat, so when creating the girls I picked and chose her qualities and distributed them with care, one or two scattered there, one or two scattered here, so that they could seem as generic as the stock characters tropes you see in most light novels, but otherwise be very obviously _her_ to me. They are like ugly, distorted jigsaw puzzles of a once beautiful whole.

The first of these jigsaw puzzles is Kanawa Kagami; the ditsy but well meaning and intelligent waitress. It is her first job, her first step out of her comfort zone, and she is trying to be more active and self reliant instead of reserved and introverted. Etsuji learns later on that she is an insatiable bookworm, scrounging out and consuming them like a vulture to another animal's corpse. She has long brown hair and chocolate eyes, which I described in the first volume to closely resemble the coffee that she struggles to serve; Ponkan 8 thought it would be necessary to give her huge oppai which I definitely didn't specify in the writing (the illustrations of Love and Coffee are still one of the most irritating things about the series).

The second piece appears when, something like half way through the volume, Etsuji is unfortunately paired with a girl for a science project, and they decide to meet up and discuss it after school at the cafe. Machiko Mei is actually quite popular (which triggers a fair few Etsuji monologues), with a range of friends who often interject their meetings with lots of passive aggressive insults. Still, I intended for her to come across quite intimidating at first, what with her determined and competitive nature, and the impassioned rants on whatever she happened to be passionate about (her and Etsuji's conversations tend to be more along the line of sarcastic quips and arguments... flirty ones later on, but arguments nonetheless) She has shoulder length jet-black hair and green eyes- like tea leaves, Etsuji writes, before using this as an excuse for why he doesn't find her good looking, which by the way, she clearly is. Again, in the vision of Ponkan 8, at least. I never actually specified in any of my descriptions that the three girls were beautiful, because really, can a disgusting contortion like them _ever_ be considered beautiful?

Then, you have the final piece. Arakaki Akane. I fully admit that she was most the agonising for me to write about, because although Mei and Kagami have portions of the woman in New York that writhe as if in unbearable agony, it is her that came closest to the genuine article. I wrote her with long scarlet hair (everyone knows that regular hair colours don't apply in light novels) and brilliant blue eyes. For her figure, I used the word "curvacious"- the closest thing I could find to a synonym of attractive that somehow didn't quite give the same impression. She is even more unpopular than Etsuji, for even though they're both loners, the riajuu of the year do not ignore Akane, and often torment her out of jealousy for her grades and her looks. As a result, her personality is conflicted; she can turn from confident and easygoing one moment to shy and socially awkward the next. The treatment and prejudices of others weakened her resolve on who exactly she was.

Ponkan 8's illustrations of Arakaki Akane are the ones I don't mind. Unlike the other two, she doesn't feel over sensualised. Mostly because I sent an expletive riddled complaint to Shogakukan after I saw their _initial_ interpretation, demanding they either tone it down or fucking fire the dickhead.

Something tells me they didn't actually read my email in its first draught. If I remember, I'll send Katsomoto a four or five year overdue thanks for the censorship.

Since all three of the girls are equal in being a scourge for literature in general, it bewilders me that Love and Coffee would have a best girl debate at all. But, the ferocity of that debate is also a source of great amusement for me, so it's a positive kind of bewilderment. Seriously. Sometimes, if I really want to have a laugh, I'll go and have a look on the most popular Love and Coffee fan website, called The 28 Sins after the on going joke in the series, and look at some of the abuse that the three sides hurl at each other. They hold a monthly poll to check the popularity of the three characters for some indiscernible reason, and it seems to change every month, which will inevitably prompt another wave of hilariously abusive posts. In fact, the results are _so_ varied that they keep a tally of the character with the most monthly victories. Machiko Mei is currently holding first position, with an almighty lead of one.

The amount of idiots on the internet is surely one of the greatest wonders of the human world. You wouldn't believe the amount of Love and Coffee fanart competitions that take place on DeviantArt. And, get this: there are over twenty thousand fanfictions dedicated to the series on various websites, about fifteen thousand on alone. _Twenty fucking thousand._ Some of them are over a hundred thousand words long. Just imagining the amount of time that's been wasted sickens me. These people give _me_ a run for my money.

Do you know what the main difference between Kanawa Kagami, Machiko Mei, Arakaki Akane and Yukinoshita Yukino is, apart from the obvious, that being three of them are fictional are the other all too real? It may seem like a trivial and ridiculous difference to notice at first, but it sticks out to me clearly and painfully, like a bullet to the stomach. All three of my characters are announced to the audience with these paragraph long descriptions, and in two cases, a dramatic entrance (or, at the very least, as dramatic an entrance as a rom-com light novel series about coffee consumption can manage). Take Arakaki Akane- Etsuji meets her because, while he is sitting down and enjoying a latte, she walks past with her own only to be tripped up by a group of girls opposite to him. She falls over dramatically, coffee spills everywhere, everyone in the cafe laughs like hyenas etc etc. This was also the scene of the infamous first Ponkan 8 Akane illustration- all I'll say is that the coffee didn't look too much like coffee when drawn over her clothes like that. Unfortunately, I'm not joking.

But Yukinoshita Yukino? When she walked into Pirelli's on the fourth day of my New York trip, unwittingly instigating a tempest that would rage through my life, I didn't even look up. I'd already been sat in my favourite seat, that looked out on the whole cafe, for about two hours and was fixated with my book, the name of which has melted away from my grasp like the last remnants of snowfall at the beginning of spring. The light patter of rain crunched on the glass windows, and she took the seat right beside them, slipping into the scene with an unalterable perfection, as if she were what Pirelli's had being missing in all it's time as an establishment without truly knowing that it was missing her.

Yukinoshita Yukino would have that effect on most things. You'll come to learn that, even when we did come to be face to face, it was as if she always remained on one side of the cafe and I on the other, cursed by me insistence that involvement itself was a curse. She was an unobtainable something that one can only long and lust to possess, but such is the nature of that something that it would crumble at unworthy hands if they stopped so low as to touch it. When I finally looked up, and saw her by the window, staring out at the rain with her hands held primly on her lap, I still didn't really notice her because I was a little too far away, isolated some ten or so tables away. I probably noted that she was absurdly beautiful, and that her hair and face were splashed with droplets of rain water, but not with too much keenness to _really_ note it.

An hour or so passed, in addition to another latte. I returned to my book. The time became five o'clock and then became a minute passed five o'clock and so on and so forth. Eventually, the other minimal spatterings of customers collected their belongings and exited quickly and clumsily through the door and were gone in the abysmal weather, and Yukinoshita Yukino and I and the bored looking waiter were left alone. It was around here that I genuinely started to look. Again, not too much _notice_ her. More so, I regarded and acknowledged her existence, and what she was doing, without processing it fully.

Somewhere amidst the fast flickering, fading time, she'd begun to write something. She pulled out a notebook from her bag, just beside her legs, and wrote. She wrote quite frantically. I must've thought it was a reminder or work or something. The urgency only increased. One page increased to two pages and then to three and then, abruptly, she stopped. She dropped her pen and it rolled off the table and she put her head in her hands.

I blinked. She remained like that for a good couple of minutes, as if imploding in on herself. At last, she raised her head and returned to looking out the window, only this time, her hands and her arms were quivering, apparent even from the other side of the cafe, and her feet and her legs were restless underneath the table.

Then, like a broken, rusty old computer in desperate need of repair, I finally realised, about a lifetime too slow. They were droplets of rain on her cheeks no longer. Instead, they were tears. Yukinoshita Yukino was crying. Silently, privately, without disturbing a soul.

I started to feel uneasy. I think it crossed my mind that I should be saying something, or offering my help, but before I could even begin to summon the courage required for such an interjection, Yukinoshita Yukino was standing up, putting on her coat and picking up her bag and walking out the door, leaving a couple of bank notes on the table that was probably far too much. She was swallowed back up by the monster of New York city faster than it had spat her out, granting me that tiny, insufficient glimpse of her, only to tear it away again as if toying with its prey. I glanced at the waiter. He was fiddling with the coffee machine. I was the only person in the whole world that witnessed her moment of weakness. Not once did it cross her mind that, behind the pillar in the corner, there sat a bastard that could and should've said something, even then. As far as she was concerned, she'd been alone in the cafe.

The next thirty minutes or so I spent shifting uncomfortably in my chair. All of a sudden, Pirelli's didn't feel quite so much the safehaven that I'd thought it the past three days, and the latte was getting cold from neglect. It approached five and the waiter informed me that they'd shutting up soon. Gratefully, I made my way to the door.

Just before I reached it, mentally preparing myself for the rain which was only growing in strength, my eyes were summoned back to the table where Yukinoshita Yukino had sat, whose name at the time I hadn't known. Her second mug of herbal tea, peppermint, still steamed slightly, rising to rest gracefully on the glass window. And there, quiet and still on the table, was her notebook. She'd left it behind.

I stared at it. Then, I looked at the waiter. He was clearing tables near to where I sat.

I walked over, snatched it from its place, stuffed it into my jacket. Then, I too was

oh my fucking god

What the fuck am I even doing. Jesus fucking christ.

I need to call Komachi

and I definitely to stop writing this because its making me fucking depressed and why the heck should i do something if its making me depressed, that make sense doesnt it, first time since i started writing

FUCK. FUCKING HELL.

Fuck is a great word. Really satisfying to type and even more satisfying to shout when there's no one else in the house. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fkuck fkcu fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfukcufuckfuck

im gonna make some coffee


	5. Chapter 5

**AN: Apologies to those who wanted more progression on the events in New York, but I wanted to expand a little more on the fan culture surrounding Hachiman's light novel series before continuing on in that vein. Thus, we have an epistolary chapter, which sets up some later stuff as well. Cheers for all your great reviews so far, btw. I'm rly enjoying writing this story.**

* * *

 _ **The Blog of Yamata Eisuke**_

 **Thank you for over 200,000 subscribers!**

 **MyThoughtsOn... Literature:** **The Inexplicable Rise of Love and Coffee**

In the final week of November 2018, a new light novel was published to huge critical acclaim. Amongst the string of four and five star reviews of the book, one in particular stood out to me, printed in the media column of the Asahi Shimbun; they described the writing as having an "exhilarating, effervescent beauty", on top of a pile of other hyperboles, and that it was "quite possibly one of the best novels, let alone light novels, that I have read in a great many years". The writer also said that they'd be "very surprised if it didn't absolutely thrill others in the same way it has to me".

Why did this review catch my eye more than any other? Because, just a couple of paragraphs down in that copy of Asahi Shimbun, squeezed just above a reminder of an analysis of the Japan soccer team's latest game in the sport section, there is another review of a light novel that was published in the very same week. The first, which garnered such praise, was Lo:Dreams: a gritty dystopic mystery series that was cancelled after its third volume due to lack of sales (although the highly positive reviews continued throughout its run). The second was Love and Coffee: an unusual little romantic comedy series published by Shogakukan. Coincidentally, its review can barely even be described as that- it reads much more like a vague plot summary. I'd go as far to saying that the writer of this summary, very probably, hadn't even read it.

This is a theme that was continued throughout my search for the initial reviews of Love and Coffee. The overwhelming majority of them, not that there are many in the first place, are brief, and the ones that do go in depth are either negative or mixed. Several of these openly mock the debut volume. Some of my favourite comments are as follows: "Hikigaya Hachiman has created a series as bland and lukewarm as, rather appropriately, a poorly made cup of coffee", and "Love and Coffee insists on portraying mundanity with a host of self referential jokes and faux-poetic descriptions. This is not a problem in itself- the problem arises when the jokes fail to land, and the descriptions feel even more mundane than their subject matter".

The popular fan run book review website, Light Novels and Us, gave it a noticeably more positive review, although this only extended to three stars out of five. It is clear that they weren't entirely sure what to make of it. They write, "Hikigaya Hachiman's first attempt at a light novel shows promise for the future, and introduces a host of intriguing characters, but all too often leaves you wondering what the point of it all is. Is it a comedy? Is it a romance? Is it a social commentary? In all respects, Love and Coffee is too unfocused in its execution to be any of them".

Bafflingly, these are all questions that remain relevant to Love and Coffee today, even after five years, five volumes, and the sale of millions upon millions of copies. Hikigaya Hachiman's "lukewarm" and "mundane" series has since become a pop culture sensation, and is unique in taking both the Japanese and the Western market by storm- last year, Love and Coffee: Volume Four peaked at number two on the New York Times bestseller list and number three on the Waterstones most sold list, which is an astonishing feat for a light novel. Teenagers and adults alike have picked up these books and been entranced by Etsuji, Mei, Kagami and Akane. This is made all the more astonishing when you consider that Love and Coffee is essentially a sleeper hit; Shogakukan put no money into marketing the first book (mostly because there's very little _to_ market), and the reclusive author continually refuses to give out any interviews or comments on his creation. Instead, it rose to prominence through strong word of mouth and a devout cult following; Volume One only really began to sell in the second month of its release.

I remember very clearly, as I'm sure a lot of others will too, the first time Love and Coffee was suggested to me. Funnily enough, I was actually in a cafe in Tokyo, awaiting the arrival of an old work colleague I'd agreed to meet up and liase with, when I saw that the woman on the table next to me was deeply immersed in yet another copy of Love and Coffee: Volume 3. At this point, I had of course heard the name of the franchise, but still knew very little about the series itself. When she started to openly laugh at one of the jokes, I was hit by a lightning bolt of realisation- it told me that I was very probably missing out by not reading these books, and so promptly asked the woman what the series was about on a whim. Her exact words, the enthusiasm with which she articulated them, and the twinkle in her eyes bring a smile to my face even today. "To be honest, it's about something different to everyone who reads it... but mostly, it's about this edgy teen called Etsuji in a cafe." Excuse me, random woman in a cafe, if I paraphrased this slightly.

Nonetheless, I was baffled by her explanation. A light novel almost exclusively set in one place, with a bare bones cast of four? It wasn't that I thought this _un_ appealing, only that I thought it lacking in _popular_ appeal. Clearly, it doesn't have the fan service and escapism of most bestselling sagas. So, I quickly dropped by the nearest bookstore on my way back home (my friend, while we're on the subject, had also read them) and purchased all three at-the-time existing volumes.

I began reading as soon I got back, a little dubious and a little excited. Many hours feverish reading later and I'd finished them, having lauged and winced and ached, but those feelings still remained. Quite frankly, I've never read anything quite like Love and Coffee in the light novel format. It's unmistakably aimed at teenagers, and the jokes require some prior knowledge of the genre to be funny, but Hikigaya Sensei (as some of his fans call him) writes an image of adolescence, and of its strange unbrindled longing, with such pinpoint accuracy that it becomes almost painful to read. There are several Etsuji-isms that I suddenly notice cropping up in conversation with people that I'd never once expect to reference them.

Much has been made of Love and Coffee's realism before, but not enough as far as I'm concerned. The characters have a raw bitterness to them; a cynical dissatisfaction with life that, no matter how much they try to hide it, is always so clear as to be brutally relatable. But, even when all four of them are irritating and childish, or overbearing and precocious, they retain this endearing sense of being unbearably delicate, like all real teenagers are. All four have personalities and ideals that come under threat one way or another throughout the series, and its thrilling to see their reactions to this. The dillemmas that drive the volumes may seem small when compared to something like Sword Art Online, but are somehow all the more thrilling because of its pulled back, realistic scale. Primarily, Love and Coffee is a story about growing up, and the characters are bound to be its most longlasting triumph. No wonder there are so few existing interviews with Hikigaya Hachiman- he must be a _real_ sour egg to have come up with Nagatomo Etsuji!

But, despite its universal accessibility, what surprised me most of all about these books is that, for a light novel, the writing can be surprisingly _un_ -light. Occasionally, Hikigaya Hachiman brings out an insight or a metaphor that wouldn't seem amiss in something much more literary, without once seeming pretentious or indulgent. For instance, there is a passage in Volume 5 that I will not quote in full, but is without a doubt worth a second read. It is also one of the series strangest and most revealing moments- if you type "L and C dream scene vol 5" into a search engine, you'll find that numerous pages on Reddit and fan websites are devoted to discussion of it. Nagatomo Etsuji remains the one character that the author has not yet explored the family life or backstory of, thus making him one of the stories' biggest mysteries. Odd, considering it occurs entirely from his first person perspective.

In it, he is awaiting the arrival of all three of his love interests (although they've all met, this is the first time that they've agreed to meet at the same time due to several overaching plot points). The three girls are relatively cold to each other, usually _because_ of their individual connections to Etsuji, and so he is feeling tired, awkward and apprehensive. Just before they arrive, he suddenly finds himself falling asleep, and what follows is a dream sequence with content so adult that it genuinely surprises me Shogakukan allowed it through. Etsuji dreams that the cafe is deserted and dimly light, and he is alone inside it save for Mei, Akane and Kagami, except that that all three of the characters are _stark naked_ , and essentially fawning over him on the sofa. I was staggered by what I was reading- his descriptions are not exactly implicit, though never quite bordering on erotic, and one article on the scene I found suggested they may even have been toned down.

Then, the three girls stretch out their arms and begin to touch their fingers together, only for the fingers to carry on straight through. They quite literally reach inside each other, without mention of blood or gore, until they are so contorted and blurred that Etsuji eventually sees them as one, single entity. This new girl, a surreal amalgamation of all three, is not described, save for one simple adjective. Etusji calls her "beautiful". One post on the 28 Sins website pointed out observantly that this was the first time Etsuji uses the word in connection to Mei, Akane and Kagami in the entire series. I sincerely suggest you go and read more on this scene and the novels in general, as it has inspired some fascinating fan theories, lending me new perspectives that I could never have dreamed would be relevant.

The scene eventually ends with a joke, completely contrasting the nightmarish imagery- he awakes to find the three girls, this time in reality, kneeling over him and giggling, for while dreaming he has spilled his coffee all over his lap. But, it is moments such as these, and Hikigaya Hachiman's fearless insistence that they should appear in a mainstream light novel series _at all,_ that it continues to captivate and inspire its still growing audience. My only gripe with the progression of the series so far is the very speed of its progression: _why can Hikigaya Hachiman not write Volume 6 faster?!_

Although you probably don't need to be told just how far the Love and Coffee series has reached out to people, I thought it would be nice to end with another personal experience I had with the series. My wife of seven years absolutely _detests_ all things light novel and anime related, in spite of frequent attempts from myself to show her the, in fairness, oft challenging to see merits of them. She insists that they are all surface level, sexist rubbish- I can't include the four letter word she _actually_ uses- but after finishing Love and Coffee, I saw an excellent oppurtunity to needle her on the matter further.

After several weeks of this continuous needling, I finally managed to get my point across, and she sat down with a great many sighs of admonishment to read, and in her eyes to be disappointed, by the latest light novel to send Japan into a frenzy.

Let's just say that, after I woke up in the morning, Love and Coffee had yet another fan to add to its swelling army. A reluctant and pouty one, but a fan all the same.


	6. Chapter 6

**AN: Apologies for the delay on this chapter. Work commitments got in the way, and Yukino's perspective proved to be harder to write than I anticipated.**

* * *

 **24th September 2023, 11:46 PM**

I have had a sudden burst of inspiration for Love and Coffee. This is, needless to say, incredibly surprising- these bursts are pivotal for every writer, because writing will suddenly burst from inside you without any warning at all, and it is this specific kind of writing that I can only describe as worth its weight in 24 carat gold. Most of the time, your imagination is full of this ugly, obtrusive stone; dreary boulders that grow like walls upon weeds of poison ivy, so thick that you can barely see a way at all, and definitely not get anywhere. But then, holy shit, its golden, and then you'd better fall to your knees and fill your hands and shovel it into your pockets because if you don't then it will be stone again and you'll fucking regret it. Nowadays, its gold for somehing like an hour, and I write in the perpetual fear that if I so much as blink, or pull my fingers away from that keyboard, then its going to be ugly and obtrusive and dreary all over and the awful, cyclical waiting will begin again.

Nonetheless, I'm sure that you can allow me just one moment of reprieve from all this pessimism: I think that this breakthrough, the latest breakthrough tossed upon a pile of supposed breakthroughs, might actually be a significant one. The biggest problem with Volume 6 thus far has been the necessity to begin a new character or plot arc. Volume 5 saw the resolution of one of the all important 'main' character objectives. The ones that the three girls began with, and by extension Etsuji, are fading away like clouds at sunset now. I neglected giving Kagami something new in Volume 5, and obviously the 'big' cliffhanger of that very same volume was that Mei finally got asked out by the super popular riajuu idiot whose been making eyes at her since Volume 3. To be honest, I still haven't got a fucking clue whether she should deny her nonsensical feelings for Etsuji and accept the riajuu proposition yet.

Maybe I'll do something super dramatic with that this time around as well, but the idea I just had seems like a much more promising road to follow. Akane's still not popular after her attempt to enter a friendship group in Volume 4 failed, so I can probably milk that for a bit longer (or hint at something new for end of this volume? *put this in planning Word document). To simplify things and hopefully bring some order and logic to the classic spinning carousel that is my mind in 'inspired mode', I can put it all down to one word: perspective. That one brilliant word was what became my elixir on Friday. Y'know what? I love you, perspective. You're my new favourite word, effectively displacing MAXX-Coffee (that can be counted as one word, right?) at the top of my official leaderboard. Gold medal for you!

My least favourite word is Yukino at the moment, if you're at all interested.

You se

Fuck it, I'm gonna be brutally honest. I absolutely fucking despise writing from Etsuji's perspective. Absolutely and completely, to my very core, or Etsuji's core, or whatever core you want, right down to the magma in the one at the very centre of the planet we like to call home. I hate him because he's a pathetic, snivelling, arrogant idiot- the kind of person who got bullied, and yeah, you should never condone bullying because of political correctness and all that, but if anyone deserved to get bullied, then it would probably be Nagatomo Etsuji. He dances and he avoids his own insecurities and faults which, by the way, are as numerous as our nearby communist's neighbours population, and what's worse, he _excuses_ them with all this loner superiority crap. Because of course, it's not his immature self that's at fault. No. It's the rest of the fucking world's fault. Yeah. It's not like that very same fucking world spat him out for a reason.

And sure, it's a joke in Love and Coffee. Yes, you can say that the joke is _on_ Etsuji for maintaining the facade of these so called beliefs and ideals, when really, no one could possibly wish to be entirely alone. But in the end, it isn't. It really isn't, because you know what? _Etsuji gets the girls._ That means the joke isn't on this pathetic, snivelling, arrogant but not really arrogant idiot for _being_ a pathetic, snivelling, arrogant but not really arrogant idiot. That means the joke, in all seriousness, is on the rest of the world. It excuses him, in all his sarcastic, snarky, precocious twattery, because he gets a glorified harem at his beck and call, which he pretends to be witty and philosophical and helpful with when really all he's thinking about is how Machiko Mei looks hot in gym shorts, and Arakaki Akane has lips that would much better be utilised around his cock than articulating words.

It excuses everyone other Nagatomo Etsuji, or wannabe Nagatomo Etsuji who reads Love and Coffee. And yeah, OF FUCKING COURSE it excuses me.

That wasn't what I intended Love and Coffee to be. It genuinely, truly wasn't. When I returned from New York, and I sat around in cafes and forgot to get off buses and I wrote that stupid stupid first volume, I didn't want it to be a harem. Or a romance, really. I wasn't even thinking that it would be a light novel- it just kinda ended up as that, because light novels are easy and shitty and that format's just about what my skill at writing deserves. It was just a way for me to spout whatever bullshit entered my mind about that beautiful woman on the other side of Pirelli's, without having to admit that it was about that beautiful woman. I was and still fucking am a man frozen in the glacier that we call love. Because really, that's what love is. Most people use that retarded fire analogy, and sure, at first you feel like you're on fire or your burning, and I still hold those intial burn marks, but eventually, it leaves you cold. It takes your blood and stops it in its place, and your pulse ceases, and you're trapped like a stopwatch that will never, ever tick again. Trapped in ice, suspended still, until love does you the favour of thawing and you can finally breathe once more.

But now, perspective. God damn fucking perspective. I don't necessarily _have_ to write from Etsuji's perspective. Sure, he still needs to be the main character in the story, but I hate him so much that writing through his eyes is like writing when your hands are chained in shackles. So, for half of this volume, or maybe more, I'll write from one of the girls perspective. Then, over time, if I ever get on to Volume 8 and Volume 9 and Volume 4573, I can indulge in the pleasure of dropping my Etsuji pen, and I'll never have to look through that motherfucker's eyes ever again.

Or, I could just kill him off right now. In a car crash, or a bizarre, on-land, coffee related drowning incident. I'm joking, obviously. Etsuji means yen in my pocket, and you can never have enough yen in your pocket. Obviously obviously obviously.

I think the girl that I'd like to write from the perspective of, first and foremost, is Arakaki Akane. In fact, I'm sure of it. The very next time I try to write Love and Coffee, maybe tomorrow but let's be honest who can be fucked, I'll start writing through her eyes and see where that gets me. I have a pretty good idea of her voice in the story right now, and her dialogue comes very naturally, as do all of the main cast's when I'm in the zone (the zone is just hard to find, okay). The only obstacle will be getting her thought process. Getting inside her head and how she thinks and making sure that its sustained and consistent.

Even for that, I have ideas though. And when I say ideas, I mean one idea, and that idea is my solution to basically everything. All together now: YUKINOSHITA YUKINO. I've been inside this woman's head before, deeply and time consumingly, and I'm sure that I can worm my way inside it again for little miss Arakaki Akane.

Sometimes, it terrifies me how similar my thought process is to Yukino's, though. That was probably one of the main reasons that I fell in love with her. I actually started this recount in the same way as she began her diary, just to amuse myself. Her head is like a clone of my own. She'll have written things, and I swear that this very thought, this very notion had flickered before me like bursts of sunlight through forest foliage as well, and that we'd both snatched at the very same sunlight, and bottled it somehow and then written it down later. Sometimes, it terrifies me even more how perfectly everything fell into place in those two weeks in New York. The world, boys and girls, is an endless, constantly moving, constantly rotating coincidence, and its a road accident and then its a love affair and its completely by chance and its frivolous and its a colossal, unpredictable, imperceptible pile of nonsense. It just _had_ to be Yukino. That specific one in a trillion in New York in the very week that Hachiman decided to stop the clocks and leave Chiba. It just had to be these two people, in that specific cafe, in that very specific moment, because you know what, fuck it, why not.

Reading that first diary entry was like the burst and the relief of being submerged in a swimming pool for longer than necessary, and then emerging too late. I walked back to The Liberty with the notebook that she left in the cafe, as if begging for me and me alone to pick it up. It was buried under the arm of my coat, protected from the howling rain, and through this storm I kept glancing this way and that, trying to perceive but knowing I wouldn't be able to perceive the shape of the crying girl whose name I didn't even know across the street, so that I might return it to her before I gave into my curiosity and read the whole thing. And give into my curiosity was exactly what I did, as soon as I got into my apartment and collapsed onto the bed.

What did she even write about? I suppose the point of a diary is that you don't really have to write about anything. You can, if you want, but not really, and to this day I'd be surprised if Yukinoshita Yukino had even the slightest inkling what it was that she wanted. I can only remember snippets, tiny instances of clarity and insight in her rambling, unfocused prose (if it can even be described as that). The previous sentence could pretty easily be applied to my writing right now, reading it back. Snowflakes of poignancy, of things that resonated, of feelings that I too had felt, even if the situation was not even remotely similar, or if I could never even come close to relating. But most of the time, I could relate. I fell in love with this person, so it'd be a bit weird if I couldn't. Although having said that, when was love ever normal?

She spent most of the first entry complaining that diaries were stupid, that she'd never even contemplate writing a diary, and that what she was currently writing wasn't even close to being a diary entry. A pointless endeavour, considering it very obviously _was_ a diary entry. Yukinoshita Yukino. Living in her own form of denial, as always.

I didn't read any more after finishing the first entry. I closed her diary shut and I put it on my bedside table, abandoned with the half-hearted promise that its abandonment was to be permanent. I remember telling myself that I definitely shouldn't be reading what I'd just read, and would eventually continue to read, and that I was a horrible person not to take the diary back to Pirelli's right now and give it to the staff and hope that she frequented the place.

She didn't frequent the place, much to my disappointment, and I most definitely didn't take it bacqeegqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqhunujgvqbeqg3qu

 **25th September 2023, 4:16 AM**

I fell asleep. Fuck.

Actually, falling asleep is a good thing. Silly Hachiman.

nite computer

* * *

 **NOTEBOOK: PURCHASED FROM STAPLES**

 **4th February 2018**

My name is Yukinoshita Yukino. I am a woman of twenty six years and am of Japanese descent, although I only spent five of those years in the country of my ancestral origin. The rest have been spent in the country which I currently inhabit, that being the United States of America. I have both a Japanese and an American passport but I would without even the faintest shadow of a doubt consider myself a Japanese citizen, and I live assured by the upmost certainty that this will continue for the rest of my days on this Earth. An example of this is my insistence on writing in Japanese kanji at every available oppurtunity, particularly in private, and this is the written form of communication that I have adopted and will continue to adopt for the forseeable future of this manuscript. Professionally and when in the presence of my family members, specifically my mother and older sister, Yukinoshita Haruno, it is expected that I utilise proper English, and though this occasionally induces a minimal degree of irritation, I am fluent in the language and therefore it is not an issue.

I believe that it is necessary that I define the boundaries and indeed the true identity of the manuscript that I am writing, for I understand that simply labelling it a "manuscript" is vague and insufficient for anyone that might eventually stumble upon it, although this is unlikely to take place. To this person, disregarding the aforementioned unlikelihood, you may be unconditionally sure that it is not and never will be a diary. I believe that those who write diaries are weak willed individuals with excessive fluctuations of emotions that they either do not understand or struggle to control and reign in, and the action of writing a diary is a release, and a means for them to channel these emotions. An example of such an individual is a girl I used to be educated with at high school. She was continually harassed by our classmates as a direct consequence of this.

Perfectionism can be simultaneously a blessing and a curse. At its most helpful, it allows you to produce the best work or performance possible, and the determination and resilience required to truly be a perfectionist are attributes you can rely on to pull you through a huge number of challenging situations. On the other hand, there is undoubtedly a reason why perfectionists can be perceived by others as pedantic or irritatingly punctilious. I would certainly prefer to be a perfectionist than not, and my exceptional grades of attainment throughout education are ample evidence of this. Here, it seems to be playing to my disadvantage. Since finishing the first two paragraphs I stared at my paper, waiting for the correct words and phrasing and balance of formality and eloquence for half an hour. It appears that eloquence and true explanation of my statement, that being how what I'm writing isn't a diary, evades me at this moment in time. I've a policy that dictates I can never lie so you'll have to accept my apologies on this matter.

What I can accomplish, however, is to continue with my original intentions and elaborate further on my motivations for writing. I am writing because I wish to fully expose the inherited and regrettably intrinsic cruelty of human nature. It is a comprehensive expose on the effects of this cruelty, and indeed the responses of individuals to this cruelty. It is also merely obligatory, due to my good and noble spirit, that I assume the role of first test subject for my expose. I shall be recording my personal findings here.

You may have my sincerest guarentee that it is not a diary. I see no reason to waste my carefully chosen words any longer on pretext. Instead, I shall skip forward to the events of the day, which I am recording as I feel it is relevant to my purpose.

Ever since graduating I have found myself employed in a publishing house only a short taxi ride away from Manhattan itself, where my family owns a luxury penthouse which I am still demanded to pay visit to at least once a week. The publishing house provies me with a wage far above that of the miminum partly because I perhaps naively believe it to be a company with good policy towards its workers, and partly because I have managed to ascend to a fairly high office. This ascension was of no surprise to me at the time and remains this way now, for my credentials are remarkably impressive, having graduated from higher university education with flying colours: continuing into the field of academia, particularly in areas of literary study (be it English or Japanese), was an option that I ruminated over at great length. This notion was at last rejected when I decided that establishing myself on the, at first, lower rungs of the corporate ladder would do more for my financial position, and much improve my independence and self-sustainability later on in life.

The rest of the Yukinoshitas did not approve of this decision, although the logic that supported it was sound and informed. My father, most likely at the continued urging of my mother, though it has always been a great concern for him too, is obsessed with that trivial, redundant concept we call a legacy. The Yukinoshita family business, and the morals and pressures of this family are things of the past, but what I view as antiquated the rest of them view as their proudest boast. We are a family of tradition, and of values, and of expectations, etc etc etc. I suppose I must be one of the first Yukinoshitas to live in a flat with rent at what most would call an affordable rate.

I hope that you will forgive my digression towards familial matters, as it is not entirely necessary- therefore, I will turn towards my study of current conditions at my place of work. The publishing house is but a subsidiary of a nationwide company called Whitecross Publishing, though this remains an important location for the company, not least because of where it is based. It is easy to take for granted that New York is one of the foremost freckles on the face of this Earth if you have lived here for the majority of your life, as I have. Just by glancing down the street as I embark on my daily commute to work, I can see the eyes of those who thrive off every second they spend in this city and see those seconds as beautiful, or enthralling, or perhaps even the greatest that they've ever experienced.

Simpleminded fools. If one was ever to reach the sophistication and general superiority that I have attained from years of personal betterment,they would also be able to dispel such hilarity inducing notions of optimism. A city is just a pile of concrete ugliness, and a greater excess of concrete ugliness does not somehow grant it more beauty. New York is only seen as thus due to typical American arrogance and bravado.

Unfortunately, my superior at Whitecross happens to be another simpleminded fool. How he has managed to elevate his authority so highly is beyond me, for the only noteworthy moment of insight that I've witnessed from him so far is appointing me as his assistant. Though everyone on my floor has at least a passable work ethic, it is (unsurprisingly) I who excels, not least because the boss seems to approach my desk every single hour, sometimes to delegate work and sometimes to ask me how the previously delegated work is progressing. He is not patronising or offensive; simply distracted and absent, if I should ever have the misfortune of interacting with him.

My true complaints arise when dealing with the rest of my counterparts working under his stewardship. As I have already made clear, they are not lackadaisacal with their assignments, or roudy and inconsiderate. They might irritate me less if they were roudy and inconsiderate. Whenever we might speak, which I confess is remarkably rare when one thinks of how much time we spend in each other's company, however interrupted. I might pass a piece of paper along our desks, or forward a memo to another who requested it, and yet I am forever struck by a staggering isolation. Not from any desire to know or to talk to these people in particular. It is a far more rudimentary and I suppose ridiculous desire than that. It is a desire for a conversation that does not exist for convention's sake, or a feeling outside of my body, that I will sense and know is more than a scientific term. Something genuine, that could never be classified or even perhaps understood.

I am incredibly dissatisfied with the words that I have just written. They are indistinct and ugly. I am afraid I got carried away. Once more, I apologise.

I shall conclude this entry by mentioning that the landlord of my flat has recently revoked his sacriligeous policy on the admittance of domesticated animals in his properties. I intend to exploit this imminently. It has been a longlasting hope of mine that I should be able to take care of a feline of my own.

This was a truly awful first entry to my expose. I personally insist it shall be more focused in future.


End file.
